


Guardian Spark

by darthneko



Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers: Prime
Genre: Alien Culture, Alien Mythology/Religion, Gen, Grief, Original Character Death(s), Polyamory
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-12
Updated: 2015-07-06
Packaged: 2017-11-29 02:03:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 7,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/681462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darthneko/pseuds/darthneko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before the Autobots, before the civil war that tore apart Cybertronian society, there were the Guardians - a military division tasked with the protection of Cybertronian space. This is a collection of out-of-sequence fics examining the early life of Ironhide, sparked into the function class of a Guardian squad.  <i>(All headcanon and OCs belong to the author)</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Waking (at the end)

**Author's Note:**

> _:: AU to the Aligned/Prime 'verse, inspired by RP worldbuilding. More characters/pairings/tags to be added as needed. Written in whatever order the prompts take me._

He came to with intakes full of the sharp mineral and heated metal taste scents of a medical bay, sterile and factory impersonal, and to an emptiness in frame and spark that was sickeningly nauseating. Systems rebooted slowly, sensors onlining in trickling cascades of null values and creeping wrongness that resolved into a baseline display across his HUD that told him nothing: _//core parameters accepted, all systems normal.//_

There was an amber lit notation to the side that was blinking slowly, calmly: _//core access unlocked//_ , it said, and beneath that was _//peripheral systems offline//_. It was alarming, or should have been - he was relatively sure that it _should_ have been alarming, but he couldn't focus on it beyond the creeping nausea of the empty sense of wrongness. 

Something moved in his outlying sensors, accompanied by the subdued chirp and beep of medical scanners. There was a flash of yellow and orange at the outset of his optical range - the meant-to-be reassuring colors of a medtech monitoring drone, but it wasn't at all reassuring. He couldn't recall where or when or, most importantly, _what_ had hit him that had required transfer to a larger facility than what could be had on ship. All he knew was that it definitely wasn't _their_ shipboard drone because that had long ago been altered to a dusty sort of purple on some overcharged whim of Palisade's and etched in glyphs that had less to do with prayers for the injured and more to do with prayers that the slagged thing would keep working. 

It wasn't shipboard at all, he realized - he knew the feel and vibration harmonics of every engine of every class of transport the Guard used and the feel of the berth beneath him and the air around him had none of them. Station. It had to be one of the larger stations, possibly one of the ones built around a solid mass body - their gravity was set too high and the atmosphere felt thicker than it should have been in his intakes. Which meant an alpha first class med facility, but also meant he must have been well and truly slagged to need that kind of repair.

Absorbed in watching the drone go about its tasks - fluid, electrical, and spark monitors, all within stable ranges, but he was keen to know what liquid drips the drone was adjusting as several of them fed into lines spliced to his own systems - he was caught by surprise at a light touch on his opposite shoulder. It startled him, spinning a dozen automatic first response protocols up...

Errors, _//peripherals offline, systems unresponsive//_ , flooded in lurid energon blue across his HUD. Secondary threat protocols, meant for backup in case of a catastrophic failure of the first, lurched him into motion - and then stopped, abruptly, entire sequence trees cut out at the root level as though they had never been.

Panic was an ugly feeling of rust and corrosion in his tanks, sour and too sharp with surging output as his engine spun up, and then _that_ cut off too, something reaching into his base code and smoothing it over cleanly as though it had never been. It left him reeling and near purging, the gnawing emptiness that he had woken to swallowing entire sectors of his processor. _//core access unlocked//_ was still displaying on his HUD and oh frag, he had thought it meant his physical core, the internal endomass bits and chassis interiors that medics were forever getting their hands into any time a mech was on a medberth, but...

Hands caught him, urging him to lay back, codes - someone else's codes - locking down his movement tiers so that he had no choice but to comply. "There," a voice was saying with that calm air specialist medic classes always seemed to have, "that's better, isn't it?"

 _No._ No, it categorically wasn't, in so many ways he didn't even know where to start. There were foreign codes in his root core, overrides that had no business there, a mech he _didn't know_ \- who was neither Palisade or Signal's familiar touches - had his deepest access keys and was actively rewriting his core. He couldn't move, couldn't act, at the mercy of a stranger's control all the way down to his autonomic functions and the feeling should have been the Pit itself but all he could feel - all the medic was _letting_ him feel - was that gaping feeling of emptiness, as though he had been hollowed out inside and left behind nothing but an exoplate husk. 

The medic - slim framed, unarmored, traditional orange and white but without any rank markings that he could recognize - gave his shoulder another reassuring pat before reaching for his chin. That, at least, was familiar, the itching buzz of scans sweeping through his endomass and a brief burst of strobe across his spectrum vision as the medic checked responsiveness. Whatever was found seemed to please him; he gave a thin smile, brief and perfunctory, as he tapped open chart readouts along the side of the berth and flicked additional glyphs into the cascade of results. "Good," he said in that same calm croon, "that's very good. Much better than last time - not that I expect you remember that, we were keeping you under until we were sure you had stabilized. Don't worry, you're doing very well."

 _Get out,_ he wanted to yell. _Get out Get Out GET OUT!_ Get out of his core, get out of his code, get out of his processor, but the panicked flare of his spark couldn't reach past the deliberately smoothed lines of his coding. The medic's overrides kept everything artificially calm over the frantic seething mass of his emotional routines. 

The medic flicked through another few screen of glowing glyphs, clustered into hierarchy knots of compound medical terms that he hadn't a hope of reading even if they weren't backwards from his vantage point. "Let's just start with the simple things," the medic told him gently. "Can you tell me your designation?"

He could. Of course he could, though the question opened several new probability trees, some of which were more reassuring than others. That sort of simple query was one posed to suspected processor damage, which might also explain the depth of the core access needed by medics working to repair critical memory and core injuries. He didn't remember being injured, but he might very well not.

On the other hand there were two answers to that question; one when you were sure of who was asking it, and one when you weren't. He _might_ have been injured. He might, legitimately, be under the care of a processor specialist who was rebuilding his core code after a catastrophic failure.

He might be on a station base that he didn't recognize, under the control of a medtech he didn't know, with no hint of his cohort-squadron medic's access codes left behind to reassure him. He might be flayed open, hacked clean through to his core, system protocols and base code vulnerable.

The medic was watching him, the mech's field where it lapped against his own professionally calm and impersonally pleasant. Slim physical fingers hovered over glyph charts in much the same way he could _feel_ foreign systems layered through and over his own, blanketed and waiting. "Your designation," he was prompted gently.

There were two answers and the second, if there were any doubt, consisted of only factory model and framing date, the original base designation of an unsparked frame fresh from the assembly line. It could be traced easily with grid record access, but it was an answer that gave little away and told the asker only the bare minimum in a hostile situation.

The medic was waiting, the very picture of professional concern, but his HUD was still calmly flashing _//core access unlocked//_ and every system was laid bare in ways that were worse than it would have been if just his chassis had been cracked open. He couldn't recall how he had gotten there, he couldn't recall anything leading up to it, only the sickening emptiness of things that were _missing_ and that he couldn't remember.

'...the last time,' the medic had said, and he watched those thin multi-jointed fingers pause over indecipherable glyph charts, felt the same fingers manifest as override codes stroking lightly across his core protocol trees where nothing foreign should ever be, and wondered how many previous times there had been. He wondered what had happened those other times that he didn't remember.

He wondered, with a sick, sinking taste of rancid impurities, the gritty ice of fear, how many times he had woken and given the _wrong_ answer and what had been cut away or changed after each one. 

His voice, at least, was his own, thick with the familiar sound structures of his function cant that was rife with xenophenomes that didn't exist in the medic's smooth homeworld pronunciation. "...Guardian." The first designation, the most important one, and he didn't think it was any imagination that the medic's field rippled just slightly, something peaking past that professional calm. He swallowed an acid tang that sat like ice crystals in his fluid lines. "Twelth strike squadron, lieutenant, first class."

The medic was waiting, expectant, optics bright. He cycled his own optics, as though that fraction of a nanoklik of not physically registering the mech on a visual spectrum might make the other's presence less heavily felt. "...Ironhide."

The medic smiled with his mouthplates only, not a trace of it rippling through the placid calm of his field. "Good. That's excellent, Ironhide. You're doing really well. I think that's enough for now, though, don't you?"

It was an order, not a query. Foreign code slid effortlessly through his core protocols, cutting, snipping, things falling away to emptiness and a gaping void of nothing that lurked beneath the first stage of a recharge cycle that he had no control over and his last thought was to desperately wonder if he would remember that waking, or his own designation, the next time they let him reboot.


	2. Insomnia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Guardians were never made to be solitary.

It was quiet in the off-rotation shift - too quiet, the very atmosphere still and heavy or, worse, moving in all the wrong ways. There was no hum in either the air or the berth beneath his backplates, none of the familiar harmonics of engines that were all he had ever known, and the absence was a thousand times more noticeable in the quiet than it was otherwise.

The gravity was set wrong. He kept coming back to that, endlessly, an instinctive first assessment that pinged relentlessly against his processor. The gravity was set wrong, Ironhide had had to shift his hydraulics and vent systems higher to compensate. Optics shuttered, he focused on that because the alternative was focusing on the Pit slagging _quiet_ and how his first protocol response to _that_ was a sparkburst of panic because the atmo-control were off, there was a malfunction, the temperature was already dropping, the ship circulation dead, engines silent, and there was no worse thing for a ship in the black than the loss of power and function.

Except there was no malfunction and the gravity was precisely what it should be for a planetary mass with Cybertron's core density and spin. Hydraulics and stabilizers calibrated for movement on ship and in zero-g had betrayed him in the planetary gravity well, giving his steps a heavy, lumbering quality and made his movements too slow and clumsy. It had been another thing for them to mock, along with the xenophonemes of the Guard cant in his speech and the wide-opticed disbelief which was all he could direct to the towering habitat levels of his native planet. 

Millions of sparks pressed into close proximity, covering every span of the planet surface. Millions of lives going about their business from one rotation to the next. A triple dozen sparks within one Academy dormitory alone, and the young Guardian swore he could _feel_ every one of them, prickling pings against his sensors in ways that had nothing to do with the longed-for warm press of his cohort, his plates clamped tight to his own frame and bereft of that familiar crushing weight.

Millions of sparks, and his oath sworn duty to _protect_ them. It was a null function equation, an impossible quandary when he was one spark, alone, and he understood now why Wildstrike had insisted, over and over, that he was offduty for the duration of the Academy courses. Even with protocols set to standby it was _killing_ him, one micron at a time, the pull at his spark a sharp ache that only fed into and burned with the automatic threat assessments of environmental errors, cascading margins of loss, millions of sparks he wouldn't be able to save, helplessly calculated every time he let his processor idle.

Venting silently, Ironhide curled onto his side, back plates flaring to shift armor density around his struts. It was a glitch. There was no environmental failure, nothing to fix or combat, but he couldn't convince the endless circles of his processor threads. Recharge wasn't possible and it was only the second rotation of a secondary education course that would stretch orns. He tucked his helm down against his knee joints, hydraulics creaking tightly, and reflected grimly that he also now understood Rampart's parting gift of a handful of circuit speeders - he wasn't sure how long his systems could go without a recharge cycle, but he suspected he was going to find out.


	3. Promotion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Know you weren't angling for it. That's one of the reasons you're getting it."

The metal rods were no bigger than his mid-flange servoes, smooth and gleaming with a fresh-extrusion sheen against the dark metal of his palm. Sensor scans - trained to reflex when handed small metal objects - had already reported back a titanium-technotium-iridium alloy that would register in a warm white spectrum through nearly all of the sensor and optical ranges a mech used. 

Four of them in all, small and fragile and inexplicably heavy in his hand. His dorsal plates were itching, drawing tighter to his frame; Ironhide vented a full system cycle and set his struts straighter, forcing the fidget down. His vocalizer, when he spoke, had only a thin thread of static to it which was well within acceptable for the surprise he had just been handed. "I... I don't know what to say, sir. Wasn't expecting this."

Wildstrike nodded, the older mech's expression inscrutable from where he sat, heavy hands - mismatched while the raw metal of two and a half newly replaced servos on his right integrated with his usual matte black limb nanite color - splayed across the surface of the desk. "Know you weren't angling for it. That's one of the reasons you're getting it." He flicked a finger against the modest pile of datapads that sat to the side, each marked with the smooth lines of the Guard insignia on their otherwise darkened screens, hard enough to jostle the whole stack. "That, and a list of action reports. Orbital C-8, L-92, E-320, Perscore, z'Qante, that rock outside of Jzeht..."

Ironhide ducked his helm slightly, armor plates shifting in an uneasy motion at the list. "Just did my job, sir."

His captain exvented in a burst, the sound sharp and dismissive. "I need more mechs who 'just do their job'. You do." He pushed back, standing, and came around the desk to face Ironhide, field brushing crisp against the younger mech's with flat, authoritative glyphs. "You've earned it, same as you earned those specialist stars. Congratulations."

Ironhide dropped his optics back to the rods in his hand, plates and field alike tucking in close to his frame. "I... Thank you, sir. I just..." He twisted his other hand up helplessly, glyphs of apology flickering through his field. "I don't want to let you down."

Heavy hands came down on his shoulders, giving him a small shake, just enough to rock his plating. "You won't." The hands tightened as Wildstrike's field shifted and it was abruptly elder cohort, not captain, who drew Ironhide closer. They were of a similar height and mass but long habit dating from his first onlined moments made the younger mech duck down as Wildstrike leaned slightly up, Ironhide's helm fitting beneath his chin. Wildstrike's arms came around the other, the hum of his powerplant taking on a deeper, achingly familiar note of wordless comfort. "You'll do your best, and that's all I'll ever ask. You can do this."

Relief on multiple levels burst through the younger mech's field, coupled with anxiety and the tiny mass deep tremors of trying to hold it all back, glyphs still sketching silent notes of apology. "You sure? I..." His optics flickered, another burst of anxiety stiffening him. "Primus, puts me at sixth, and I..."

Wildstrike huffed a partial ventilation. "That's what's got your lines kinked?" His hand came up, cupping the back of Ironhide's helm as his engine took up the bass rumble harmonic, forming a tangible vibration that translated from frame to frame. Plates tesselated, shifting, until the younger mech was pressed to spark warm inner layers, cupped within the heavy shield of Wildstrike's armor. "Scrap it, bitlet. Sixth or thirteenth, don't matter. I'm not planning on taking a rotation through the Well any time soon."

"Not a bitlet any more," was the half-sparked response, muffled against Wildstrike's shoulder plate.

The older mech chuckled. "I know. And believe me, if we didn't need it I'd give you a pass on this." He field flickered glyphs of regret as he pressed his cheek plate against the top of Ironhide's helm. "'Hide, you're one of the brightest Solarian sparks I know, always giving, always doing for. I'd have sent you for medical if we didn't need weapons so badly-"

"I like guns," Ironhide interjected, but his harmonics echoed traces of youngling to elder, hesitant and seeking approval in ways a first ranked specialist should never have to. Wildstrike's cupping hold against his helm became a sharp flick that rang off his audials, eliciting a flinch and a sound of protest from the younger. 

"Yes, well, lucky us," Wildstrike agreed mildly. "Look - I know this ain't what you do naturally, but you do it and you do it well." His field was steady, a solid warm pulse of strength against Ironhide's own. "I need you out there, on the field, pulling afts out of the smelter, but I promise you this - klik you're off the field, we've got your back. You're off the officer roster on ship. Can you do that?"

Ironhide shuttered his optics for a long moment, just soaking in the warmth and assurance of the other's field. He could, he realized, say no. Wildstrike was a good officer, working within the limitations of his squad. Ironhide could say no and the captain would respect that, but the fact that Wildstrike was offering it to him at all meant the other mech had run every probability already and was willing to take the chance.

They weren't, any of them, in the habit of defying their squad leader. Ironhide cycled a deep ventilation and made himself take a step back, their plates slipping loose from one another until his own were settled crisply back around himself once more.."...yes, sir, Captain."

Approval washed through Wildstrike's field even as the older mech straightened, armor and field duty crisp once more. "Good." He grinned slightly. "You'd best report to medical to let Palisade start drilling, then. I expect to see those inlaid by next shift, Lieutenant." The word was the more startling for being the first time spoken, the Captain's salute sharp and precise across the Guardian brand upon his chestplates. "Congratulations."

Ironhide straightened on reflex, returning the salute just as briskly. "Yes, sir!" The bars of inlay alloy were far heavier in his hand than the slight mass of them had any right to be - would be heavier, by far, as rank glyphs on his shoulder plating - but what the cohort-squad needed came first. If the captain thought he could fill the position, then by Primus, he would.


	4. Naming

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> His identifying factory number was MS-289-06L.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is, if you squint, underage or coming-of-age first time spark sex. I don't warn for such on the overall fic because it's not presented in that context as humans would consider it - they're aliens, this is well within the bounds of normal for them.
> 
> * * * * *

_Prompt: "Every man is born as many men, and dies as a single one."_

His identifying factory number was MS-289-06L; like every frame ever sparked he had come online with that knowledge already stamped into the first lines of his base code, indelible and unchanging - model, origin site, and batch number all in one.

His _designation_ was 'bitlet' - uttered in varying shades of affection, comfort, frustration, command, summons, or exasperation, all wreathed in the glyphs of his factory number to differentiate him from MS-256-05C, who was _also_ 'bitlet' but who had come online an orn after he had. Sometimes the both of them were also 'youngling' or 'sparklet', depending on who in the cohort was speaking, but it was all minor variations in the same tone and meaning.

He had two combat actions to his record but that record, unlike the senior cohort's designation and rank, was filed under his ident number. There was a space there, left for a proper designation, but he had no way of knowing what that should be and none of his cohort had assigned him one yet. He was simply, like every newspark awakened into the Guard, 'bitlet'.

He knew the truth, of course. Every newspark did, traditions and history written into their coding nearly as deeply as their sworn oaths. He knew this unnamed period was only his Awakening, knew that there were 138 sparks within the Well at the time of his onlining - two lineages of which had been reclaimed in the time since he had come online while another seven spark departed for the Well since, but that left 136 unknown Guardians. 

He didn't know the designations of the Well sparks. Those records were blocked to him, though Rampart had only given him an exasperated look when the squadron 2IC had caught him trying to access the files. The mech had set him three duty shifts of assisting Palisade in scrubbing down medical - which was barely a punishment, really, as Palisade had a ready supply of rust sticks and stories, both of which he enjoyed. 

All told, it never really bothered him, that lack of a designation. He was 'bitlet' and 'youngling', oldest of their two newsparks, a Guardian and member of the 12th mobile strike squadron. On duty, he was the lowest ship rank, without specialty or experience, answerable to all; off duty he was welcome in every area, free to worm himself beneath arms, press into the warmth of his cohorts' field, poke helm and questions into everything, and suffer no more than the occasional annoyed "bitlet, I'm trying to _work_!" It just _was_ , the way the cohort was, the way the ship and space and the rotating duty shifts were. It was all he had ever known.

He had known four vorns of that existence and might have known many more without any hardship. It was Shockcharge, their primary pilot, who caught him without warning inbetween shifts in the corridor. "Bitlet? Captain wants to see you."

He was reasonably certain he hadn't done anything (recently) that required the personal attention of the captain (or at least nothing he had been caught at), but if Wildstrike called then the members of the squadron went. Shockcharge stuck with him, nudging him along to the briefing room that served as the only formal squadron space on the ship, and it was only the other mech's heavy frame braced behind him in the doorway that kept him from bolting when the door slid back to reveal every senior cohort member gathered there. 

Whatever he had done, it hadn't been _nearly_ enough to warrant _this_. 

Shockcharge gave him a shove forward from behind, field flicking _expectation-amusement_ at him. Hunched up, plating clamped tight, he had no choice but to shuffle into the room, optics flicking from one mecha to the next. They didn't, any of them, look angry and that was reassurance enough for him to open his field, parsing the electric unspoken whisper of the cohorts' mood.

_Anticipation. Expectation. Excitement._

Wildstrike stepped forward, catching him neatly around the shoulders and steering him forward the necessary steps to the long table at the center of the room. "Pick one," the captain directed, and it took the younger mech a confused moment to realize that there were things on the table surface - metallic disks, a little smaller than his palm plating, evenly spaced all along the perimeter of the table. Wildstrike cupped the back of his helm in one hand, a familiar and comforting touch. "Without looking," the captain clarified. "Take your time. Choose whichever one feels right. There is no wrong answer."

His ventilation caught short and sharp in his systems. _This_ \- this was important. It might be one of the most important things he would ever do. Plates flickering in a low shiver, he stepped forward, his cohort parting to give him room as he approached the table. Flat metallic disks; identical, evenly spaced, thirteen in all. He started to reach for the nearest - stopped himself, uncertain, but Signal, their secondary medic, caught his optics and nodded. "Touch all you want. Don't pick up until you're sure."

Given permission, he ran his fingers across the nearest disk. Room temperature, smooth to the touch. A base blend of titanium, tungsten, and chromium, the same as their blast armor. Exactly 4.8 _tars_ in circumference, 0.23 thick, perfectly circular. 

The next one to the left was the same. And the one after that, and after that. 

He made it around the table once, examining each disk. The steady pulse of his cohort around him reassured him, but he glanced up when he reached the first disk once more. Nineteen pairs of optics looked back, waiting, expectant, but there was no urgency in the feel. No impatience pushing at him, only a background blanket hum of quiet anticipation. He hesitated and reached out once more, circling the table with slow, deliberate steps, palm sensors clicking to first one disk, then the next, looking for anything to differentiate one from the other.

There was nothing, but his fourth time around the table he found himself pausing at the first long edge, hands lingering at the fourth disk in the sequence. He made himself stop touching it, keep walking, but he hadn't made it past the far edge of the table before he found himself backtracking, hands drawn to that one identical disk. It felt warmer somehow, welcoming against his palms, and after looking around once more for something - a clue, approval, _something_ \- he drew in a deep ventilation and lifted it from the table, holding it cradeled between his hands.

The cohort collectively exvented and it was Shellburst's deep voice that exclaimed "told you!" into the quiet. Laughter, warm and welcome, burst out in his wake - "frag you," came from Lastline, amused, and Rampart's "hush, the lot of you," was backed up with several hisses for silence. Wildstrike, smiling, stepped forward to lift the disk from his hands, turning it over. There, etched shallowly into the under surface - too shallow to register to basic scanners - was the glyph emblem of the hammer, the symbol for Solus Prime. 

"From the Well of Allsparks we are called, and to the Well we depart," Wildstrike said, voice heavy and glyphs forming thick, deep knots of tradition all around the spoken words. The captain placed the disk carefully back into his hands, closing the younger mech's fingers around it. "From the beginning of our freedom we have served, knowing that every Guardian is bound by oath and spark to return to our duties and that our own will come back to us."

His ventilations had ceased altogether, systems clenched tight and rigid, optics wide, spark a fast, frantic vibration within his chassis. Wildstrike's hands came up, framing his helm to either side, and it was habit printed into his mass memory to lean up as the older mech leaned down, pressing their forehelms together. The captain's voice slipped into warmer glyphs, cohort harmonics that wrapped him up and pressed him close, reassuring. "Open up, bitlet." 

There were hardline medical ports buried beneath thick blast armor to either side of a mech's chassis. It was easy and familiar to fold back armor, plates flaring as the ports spiraled open. He had come online with them open, the captain linked into his systems as the elder mech had uploaded his base drives with code and compressed history. Countless times since he had opened them to elder cohort, for the transfer of data and teaching packets, code tweaks, and system alignment. Some of the system locking apprehension slipped away as Wildstrike clicked cables to ports, his code trees opening readily to the comforting data touch, letting him resume ventilations as he relaxed into the warm wash of the other's field.

That lasted for a bare klik before Wildstrike's ruffling through his code trees found the sector the elder mech was looking for. A command code he wasn't familiar with triggered; he had a nanoklik to trace it to both autonomic and voluntary branches before armor locks deep in his chassis opened, chestplates pulling back in a tesselation of plating.

He made an involuntary sound - startled, alarmed, tinged with fear - as pale gold sparklight spilled past his own plating. Wildstrike's hands cupped his helm, the elder mech crooning a low thrum of reassurance, and large hands caught him from behind to draw him back against an equally large chassis - Breaker, the eldest of the cohort, had slid up behind him, the heavy strength of his frame a solid, unwavering point and his deep, multilayered field pulsing comfort and safety. 

"It's alright, bitlet," Wildstrike told him. The elder mech's hands were gentle and inside his coding he could feel the pressure-sense-charge of a datapacket queued for delivery - a large one, growing larger as the captain assembled the data for transmit. The elder mech waited until the close press of familiar frames and fields eased the alarm from his ventilations, waited several kliks more, the reassuring hum of the captain's engine a counterpoint to the deeper harmonic of Breaker's and the tangible throb of the rest of the cohort around them, until the frantic flicker of sparklight had quieted into a steadier throb. Only then did Wildstrike bump helm against his own, the elder mech's grin bright and infectious. "There. Ready now?"

He nodded, not trusting his vocalizer. Breaker had slipped the disk from his grasp and it was the artillery mech's fingers, pressed against his own, that gave him something to hold onto. Wildstrike sank down to one knee, sparklight glinting white and gold off of his black armor, tracing bright points across his faceplates as he leaned in. MS-289-06L had one moment of anticipation, fear of the unknown and apprehension, clenched tight and trembling through spark and systems, and then...

The first sound of his true designation burst through him with all the strength of a pulse blast, punching through armor and systems to explode in hot fire and an effervescent charge that was like dying and onlining all at once. He couldn't hear or parse it, too caught in the _feel_ as Wildstrike's vented vocalization streaked charged heat through his spark, glyphs whispered into his very core. Transfer initiated, data spilling into his drives, unfurling in solar flares and nebula bursts through everything he was, filling in the gaps of everything he had ever been.

_...He was a number, an interchangeable part, a slave, valued only for the hard coded skill their masters had granted him..._

_...He stood beside their greatest, Primus blessed, and tools had become weapons, obedience become determination, the wild charge of freedom within his spark and a number had become a name..._

Memory after memory wrote themselves into him - a dozen deaths, a dozen lives, battlefields and combat, cohort, creation, a dozen different squadrons. He was an engineer, a mechanic, a medic. He worked with weapons, with living frames, with ships and parts. His frame, viewed through other optics, shifted - now red, now black, once a bright slash of fearless green, the heavy bulk of a grounder, the heavier but sleeker silhouette of a flight frame. He was lieutenant, corporal, 3IC, eldest, youngest, and everything inbetween. 

Cables clicked free, others took their place, and another shock pulse of heat swamped his spark, the shape of the glyphs twisting tangibly through his core. A sound was roaring through him, vibrating struts and plating alike. Memories overlaid themselves, painting swathes of color and reality on some, leaving others as bare points of reference sketched in record entries. Every combat action, every command, every rescue or retrieval. Cohorts, mates, mentors, youngling apprentices, colleagues, millions of vorn stretching in a nearly unbroken line of recollection, record, first and second and third hand memories that wrote themselves into his drives, settling into him to sketch and shape a whole that was as familiar as his own spark. 

Again and again, heat burned through core and spark, memories and data, until he was lost in it and couldn't have said how much later the physical world slowly coalesced around him. His fans were roaring, desperately venting heat and the skirling wisps of charge that were still sparking crackles of bright hot pleasure through his plating. He had lost his pedes at some point - it was the floor beneath his backplates, the floor and Breaker's knees, where the elder mech was gently disconnecting the last cable from his port, his helm cradled against the other's ventral plates. 

A manual prod - Palisade, the medic's larger mass half curled against his side - prompted him to fumble for the command that would close his plates, armor sliding back into place over his spark. Solarflare was on his other side, the sniper's mass dwarfed by Shellburst behind him and everywhere he could reach by touch or field was his cohort, solid and real, the combined hum of their squadron the harmonic that made up everything of his life. _This_ life. 

Blitz shifted between his sprawled and sensor-shot knees, letting Wildstrike step into his place. The captain smiled down at him, optics bright. "How do you feel?"

There wasn't a single portion of any system that didn't feel charge swamped, weak and overloaded, sensors stripped raw by too much sensation and processors grinding from the influx of data. He wasn't sure he could _feel_ his pedes, never mind stand on them, strutless and disconnected from his frame. He groaned, the sound static shot, and reached up to accept the elder mech's hand in a solid grip. Even his voice was heavier, different in his own audials, field and glyph layered with a deeper sense of self than the bitlet he had been only a breem before could ever have imagined. "Like I never left."

Wildstrike laughed, gripping his wrist, and between a combined pull and push from the others they hauled him upright. The captain caught him against his own chassis, steadying him, his field pulsing joy and love and greeting all at once. The others echoed it, clustered around him, and he shuttered his optics and soaked it in, knowing it for everything that it was and everything that he had been or would be, in this lifetime or any other. Wildstrike chuckled, reaching up to frame his helm between hands, the gesture something he could remember receiving and bestowing a million times, the shape of the glyphs the other spoke next solid and _real_ within his spark, belonging to him and him alone.

_"Welcome back, Ironhide."_


	5. Loss

It was quiet in the corridor outside of medbay; too quiet after all of the post-combat flurry. The cohort had dispersed, only the hum of the engines and the distant sounds of movement and working drifting into the quiet where too many frames and voices had been packed, echoing, only joors before. 

Quiet enough to hear the thrum of his own spark when he lagged back to stay, the hiss and fluid rush of his own internal systems, and the tell-tale metal on metal dissonance where he couldn’t stop vibrations from shifting through his frame. Ironhide vented, hating the sound of his own vapor cycle, the tremor he couldn’t squash, and the silence, as he stood, rooted to the deck plating, watching the heavy double orange and white barred doors of the medbay as though willpower alone might open them.

“Yer allowed t’ go in.”

He didn’t, quite, yell, but his full frame flinch of surprise was sharp and sudden, sending him clattering back against the far wall of the corridor before he could catch himself. Wildstrike paused, hands flicking up in a brief gesture - _at-ease, calm_ \- but his field was off-duty warm, brushing Ironhide’s in silent support. “Sorry. Didn’t mean t’ startle yeh.”

“Yeh could try takin’ th’ fraggin’ baffles off,” Ironhide snarled, slamming his back plates up against the wall as though the reassuring solidity of the ship could ward off other unwelcome surprises. 

The older mech made a noise of agreement, field tinged in rueful apology. Wildstrike was still kitted for their last combat action, his usual black plates splashed in visual spectrum distortion patterns, the sounds of his system and treads muffled under insulating strips inserted through joints and plate edgings. “Sorry,” he repeated, easing into the space at Ironhide’s side.

Joor. It had only been a few joor, barely enough time for the squad captain to finish the debrief, reports and washrack waiting until after. There was still silicate grit in Ironhide’s lower seams; he had pulled his own baffles out at some point, but couldn’t remember when. Barely enough time to stow gear and cycle the ship back up, hardly enough time to see to any minor injuries…

The tremor came back, harder, setting his plates to shaking. He was gritting his dente, struts clenched, trying to still the damned fault in his lines that was making it happen, when Wildstrike’s hand pressed warm to his shoulder. “Yeh can go in,” the captain told him, gently. 

Ironhide shook his helm, numbly, the gesture too stiff and jerky. “’S medbay…”

“I know,” Wildstrike said. The hand on his shoulder tightened, but Ironhide couldn’t feel it properly, pressure parsing separately from heat and EM. “But this ain’t like when Palisade yells ‘get out’ ‘cus he needs us out of his way. Nothin’ sayin’ yeh can’t go in.”

Something was wrong. He knew it, dimmly, could feel it in the asynchronous trip of his ventilation cycles, in the way his processor threads were running too many all at once, data streams tangled and slowed. “Shouldn’t… Ah… Should Ah?”

“Don’t know,” Wildstrike told him. “That’s up t’ yeh, an’ yeh ain’t gonna know until yeh try.”

“But, it…” The tremor was all through him now and he couldn’t formulate a whole thought, one thread splintering into the next, and the tremor was through all his plating now no matter how tightly he locked his struts. “Frag!” It came out harsh, clipped, and Ironhide didn’t know he had slammed his fist back against the wall until Wildstrike caught his arm, pressing it down so that he couldn’t do it again. “Sorry, Ah can’t…” There was static in his vocalizer, glyphs broken by the uncontrolled tremor. “Frag, Ah shouldn’t be… Ah…”

“Shhhh.” The other mech crowded in against him, catching Ironhide’s hands in his own, the warm press of field and frame thrumming with the deep comfort of elder cohort, safety and soothing. “Shhh, bitlet, it’s alright. Yer fine.”

“No Ah ain’t!” It burst out of him, sharp and strident, and in the safety of Wildstrike’s embrace the tremor dissolved into full on shakes, rattling through his frame. Ironhide sucked in a ragged vent cycle, vocalizer breaking into glyphless sounds of pain. “Frag… frag, Ah shouldn’t be… Ah know, Ah _know_ , Ah just… Ah can’t…”

Wildstrike caught him close, his hand on the back of Ironhide’s helm pressing the younger mech’s head down, tucked against shoulder plating, a mass equal to his own pushing him back against the safety of the wall. “Yer fine,” the captain repeated gently. “Yer right, yeh _know_ , an’ that’s the problem. It’s alright, bitlet. Stand down, Ah’ve got yeh.”

It was one part order, couched on a comfort that Ironhide couldn’t have pushed away even if he had wanted to. Vents choking, he buried his helm against the other mech’s shoulder, shaking, the words in his vocalizer thin and breaking. “Ah shouldn’t be… this ain’t, Ah just can’t…”

“’Course yeh are,” Wildstrike hummed soothingly, his hand cupping the back of Ironhide’s neck, fingers digging into joins at the base of his helm. “Bitlet, yeh ain’t had yer name more’n six vorn, an’ we ain’t lost a spark since yeh came online. Yeah, yeh _know_ , here,” he tapped against Ironhide’s helm, “but not _here_.” The second tap was to his chestplates, over the insignia that stood out against Ironhide’s red plating. “Have t’ learn it new, every rotation out of th’ Well, an’ it ain’t ever easy. Yeh can know it in yer memory all yeh want, but in yer spark? That’s all new. Ain’t nobody expectin’ yeh t’ just get on with it.”

Something broken and pained surged up through Ironhide’s vocalizer. Wildstrike didn’t try to shush him, only held him as he shook, frame and arms solid and safe. He couldn’t protest, couldn’t even look up when another frame pressed up against his other side, wrapping him in the warm, familiar press of cohort and an even greater mass, Blitz’s flight engine humming a deep felt vibration through him that eased the formless tremors. The hum of private plate to plate comms passed him by and finally, when he could draw a full vent cycle again, Wildstrike eased back enough to lift Ironhide’s chin. 

“Yeh want t’ go in?” the older mech kept the question open, no judgement in it, just let Ironhide look at the closed medbay doors and decide for himself. Untrusting of his own vocalizer, he nodded jerkily.

It was Blitz who helped him up when Wildstrike stepped back, the big aerial frame holding him steady. “It’s okay if yeh can’t,” he said softly, as the captain triggered the heavy doors to slide back. “We’re right here with yeh. All of us, ‘cept Palisade’ll strip th’ plates off us if we all come bargin’ back in here again. Easy, bitlet. C’mon. Just go take a look.”

The four steps from one side of the corridor to the other had never seemed so long, or so hard to make his fault ridden hydraulics cross. Wildstrike was already inside the medbay, speaking softly to Palisade who was at the counter, hands busy with pieces of something at the sterilizer. 

The body - it was only a body, Ironhide told himself savagely, only a cooling frame, inert metal and parts - lay on the primary medberth, already scrubbed clean. Bright, silvery metal, without a hint of glossy black pigment or the bright splash of gold trim. Just a heavy ground combat frame, the same as Ironhide’s own, laid out as though ready to be wrapped and packed for shipping, as unmarked as any newspark before initialization. 

Like Windspeed, Ironhide thought, memory files recalling vividly the combat aerial frame of the newspark who had come online with them only just before Ironhide himself had gone for advanced training. A pristine frame, just waiting, nothing but raw potential - except it was anything but. There was nothing left of the silicate dirt or the char marks but the metal of the chassis was still warped where it had melted, the chestplates distorted into unfamiliar lines despite having been pushed back into a semblance of order.

There was no potential there, there was _nothing_ there, no life, no spark, no remnant of the mech it should have been. Ironhide could hear his own systems roaring inside of him, his spark nothing but pain, fans a shriek of broken, stuttering cycles. There was nothing left and for as many times as he had known death through all of the lifetimes he had served in the Guard there was _nothing_ like this, like the empty mockery that lay on the medberth, devoid of Burn’s rich, flashy colors or vibrant energy or his vornmate’s easy, ready grin. 

The sound, wordless and strident, crackling through a static shot keen of grief didn’t parse as belonging to him until Blitz caught him up against the other mech’s chassis, his own sound throwing a counterpoint buzz against the thrum of the other’s larger engine. Dimly he saw white and orange, Palisade’s frame blocking the medbay from his view, the medic’s face in focus one moment, his hands the next, as though his buffer memory was losing every other segment. The world spun, his gyros loose and tumbling, medical codes bursting like tracer fire across his processor threads.

When Ironhide could focus again his first awareness was of cohort, the press of multiple frames and sparks, the warm, seamless wrap of overlaid EMs. Shockcharge, he recognized dimly, curled around his back, Breaker’s mass and steady presence wrapped around both of them. Rampart at his side, Nitro tucked into a smaller ball against the other side, Windspeed trembling against him and it was Blitz’s chassis Ironhide was pressed to with Shellburst another greater-mass presence wrapped around the whole, more of the cohort pressed close beyond that. 

Safety, cohort, the frames that weren’t within easy reach touchable by comm, except for the one blank line that fed back only the hum of a dead connection. Ironhide tried to brace for the pain but it was muted, dizzy and too distant to feel.

“Easy,” Rampart hummed, a hand touching Ironhide’s face. “Easy, bitlet. Palisade took it all offline for awhile, it’s alright. You’re safe, we’re here.”

Ironhide managed a sound, reaching blindly. Someone’s hand found his, fingers sliding together, holding tight. Someone else - one of the heavy artillery, a bass sound deep enough to vibrate through all of them - made a wordless sound of grief, then another, settling into a slow rhythm. Other engines took it up, the lighter keen of the scout classes, the mid-grade thrum of the grounders, a sound of loss woven into and through their very frames. 

Ironhide shuttered his optics, curling down tight. Muffled by medical coding, it still ached, an undefined cold spot where his vornmate should have been, and all the press of his cohort couldn’t replicate the way Burn’s field had meshed and prickled with his own, or the way the other mech had forever sprawled across him when their recharge cycles lined up, elbows in Ironhide’s vents and fingers slipped into loosened joints just to hold on. ‘Get off’, he had said, times beyond count, from the first moment his newly initialized vorn sib had been pushed into the center of the cohort along with him. ‘Get off, let go, you’re grabby.’

There was nothing grabbing him now, nothing holding on, and that loved and hated, infuriating and charming presence would never be there again, not the way it had then. Vents skipping, Ironhide opened his intakes, let his own grief and the prickling sense of emptiness warble through his systems, engine falling brokenly into synch with his cohort as they sang the first threads of loss.


End file.
